Camp Halleck at Osage Springs

Camp Halleck was less a camp than a district. Samuel Curtis's Union army, named for Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, his superior in St. Louis, spread along about five miles between Cross Hollow and Osage Springs in February 1862, after the Confederates burned their winter quarters and left. The Rogers Historical Museum's assistant director has called it possibly the largest Union post in Arkansas, though local historians could not confirm that. A Union soldier's letter of February 24, 1862, describes the camp at the edge of a prairie, days before Curtis pulled back toward Pea Ridge on March 5.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Walmart Museum — 4.3 mi
  Sam Walton's 1950 variety store on the Bentonville square, now a free museum with his 1979 pickup, a recreated office, the 1945 Newport store door and a 1950s-style soda counter.
• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — 4.8 mi
  A 2011 Moshe Safdie building on 120 acres of Ozark forest in Bentonville, with free admission, six trails, two ponds, a spring, an arboretum and a relocated Frank Lloyd Wright house.
• Pea Ridge National Military Park — 12 mi
  Where Union troops held the March 1862 Civil War battle that kept Missouri in the Union, with Elkhorn Tavern, a Cherokee Trail of Tears road and a signed tour route.
• Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area — 14 mi
  Arkansas's largest state park, about 12,000 acres on Beaver Lake, with the Van Winkle mill site, a graveyard of enslaved people, 54 miles of trail and regulated hunting.

More markers nearby

• Benton County First Court House — 4.3 mi
• Cross Hollows — 4.4 mi
• Rev. James Ingram — 7.1 mi
• Elm Springs in the Civil War — 8.1 mi